Randall Polito has watched leaders get paralyzed waiting for perfect information.
They're facing a decision. They want more data. More time to analyze. More certainty before they commit. So they wait. They gather. They deliberate. And while they're waiting, the moment passes.
Here's what Randall Polito has learned: perfect information never comes. Certainty is a myth. And the best leaders aren't the ones who wait for both.
There's a reason they call it "making" a decision. You're not discovering it. You're not finding the one right answer that's hiding somewhere if you just look hard enough. You're making it. You're deciding. You're choosing one path over another with incomplete information and the knowledge that you could be wrong.
That requires courage.
Not the courage of certainty. The courage of action despite uncertainty. The willingness to look at what you have in front of you, do your best thinking with it, and then say: "This is the call."
Randall Polito thinks most people confuse leadership with expertise. They think a leader is someone who knows the answer. But leadership isn't knowledge—it's the willingness to decide when knowledge is incomplete.
Here's the hard part: you'll make decisions with imperfect information, and some of them will be wrong. That's not failure. That's the job.
Randall Polito has made calls that didn't work out. He's had to walk them back. He's had to say "I got that wrong, here's what we're doing instead." And he's also made calls that worked out better than he could have predicted, precisely because he didn't wait for perfect conditions to act.
The difference between leaders and non-leaders isn't information. It's the willingness to decide.
There's another piece Randall Polito won't skip: the decision has to be for the good of the group, not for you. Not because you want to be right. Not because you're protecting your reputation. But because you've looked at what serves the mission, what serves the team, what serves the outcome—and you've decided based on that.
When you're making decisions for the group instead of for yourself, you can actually move. You're not second-guessing yourself. You're not hedging your bets. You're not trying to protect yourself from being wrong. You're just deciding what's best and moving.
That's leadership.
Randall Polito thinks about this constantly. You'll never have perfect information. You'll never be certain. But you have to decide anyway. And you have to do it in the moment, with what's in front of you, in service of something bigger than yourself.
That's what separates people who lead from people who manage. Managers execute known plans. Leaders decide when the plan changes.
The courage isn't in being right. The courage is in deciding.
— Randall Polito